What is happening to the United States is that corporations are looting the federal government. Grover Norquist eat your heart out, your fondest desire might actually be coming true but the consequences will be very bad for everyone. For corporations should never be in the business of providing government services. We’re seeing that push here in Rhode Island, our Republican governor who is also a Bush supporter wants to privatize just 1,000 state jobs. That’s the camel poking its nose into the tent.

How did corporations get so bold? It’s simple, under a fictional legal theory, little more than a comment inserted by a clerk who was paid by the Southern Pacific Railroad, corporations are under the mistaken notion that they have the same rights and privileges as a real person. They should have no such thing, for if they did not they wouldn’t be able to throw money to congress via PAC’s and other vehicles for corporate malfeasance like no bid contracts.

I interviewed with one firm mentioned in the article, Custer-Battles. First, I knew about the shell companies and had alarm bells ringing like crazy in my head. They had advertised the job as full time but when I had gotten to the car after the interview Battles calls and asks if I’d do contracting. I told him to kiss my ass. Turns out my alarm bells over Custer-Battles were correct but get this, even though they had a judgment against them, it was overturned by a Bush friendly jurist at the appellate level. How’s that for disgusting, I know they’re dirty, everyone knows but the courts that are supposed to protect us instead protect corporations that are defrauding the government and therefore the taxpayer for billions.

Consider the $544 Billion dollars spent in Iraq so far. Had we not gone there that $544 Billion might have helped victims of Katrina and maybe, just maybe, we could have a single payer health system in the United States.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until it happens. We MUST change the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to specifically EXCLUDE corporations from the rights derived by that amendment.

How to do that is the conundrum. We cannot depend on our representatives since every single one of them has been bought and paid for many times over.

We’ve all seen how that works. We now have bankruptcy law that benefits the creditors rather than the debtors. We also have corporations like Verizon et al trying their damnedest to kill net neutrality, or the RIAA who won’t adapt to the times, instead they prefer to litigate their way through. Those are just three examples but I’m sure you can think of more, like maybe the oil and gas companies who reap obscene profits while we pay dearly at the pump. Just keep thinking about all the little ways corporations try to screw you and you should be getting very upset. Good, that’s precisely the kind of thing that moves our society forward.

We must lift ourselves into the fray and create a true opposition party that is funded by the people, and not by corporate interests. We have to start locally because constitutional amendments require ratification by the states, so start there and move onward. Howard Dean hit on this briefly when he had several million people chipping in $25 here and there to elect him as the Democratic President. It has to be grassroots and it will take time, I can only hope that it takes as short a time as possible to stop this craziness once and for all.

A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System: Switching Technology 1925-1975 G.E. Schnidler, Jr. Ed.

I’m very interested in the history of telephony and this book spans the time between manual service to the first electronic telephone switch (ESS). It applies to part of my job which is managing an Avaya Prologix PBX, and it helps my understanding as to how they built the system.